The Lost Art of Listening - Part 3

Today, let us continue to talk about how you can improve your listening skills, thus making you a powerful communicator.

Ask a question and then keep your mouth shut. This sound so simple, but in practice, it is one of the hardest thing about being a good listener. You will feel the desire to butt into the conversations at many points, but don't. However, if there are parts of the messages, that you don't understand, ask for clarification. Think of yourself as an interviewer.

Here are some of the tips for asking effective questions, being with the cardinal rules.

Ask open ended questions. Questions that cannot be answered with a simple "Yes or No". Such as How can we do this or What do you think? Your objective is to get the other party talk as much as possible.

You might think "Why" is a good question to ask.It certainly open ended, and probes for reason and motivation. But why can be intimating. It put people on the defensive. So don't ask why, ask "How come"

Very often, a lot of useful information can be gleaned from imaginary scenarios. Ask what if. Start with plausible scenarios, then as you get better at questioning, try slightly more incredible ones. If you are skillful enough, seeming preposterous scenarios can elicit the most truthful response, or give you a deeper insight into the person's psyche.

Make the other person feel comfortable by demonstrating that you care about their feeling and understand where they are coming from. Offer alternative, which way do you prefer?, How do you feel about this..and so on. Repeat what they say. This is a great technique to prevent misunderstanding and convince to the person that you are really listening.

Listening sounds like a simple thing, but it takes a lot of work and effort to do it very well. Effective listening and negotiation involves suppressing your reflexes and response and creating an environment which allow another person to express himself without having feeling threatened.

Try out these listening tips. You'll begin to realize how important listening is in effective communication.

Song of the Day: From this Moment

I like her songs. She is one of my favorite singer, Shania Twain..We must to enjoy every moment we are in be it the place, environment, the state we are in and the people around. Enjoy this song.

Quit Complaining

We all know that life wasn’t meant to go your way all the time. This state of flux is designed to help us grow into the kind of human beings we can be, to help us understand how we fit into the larger scheme of things, and to prevent our minds and bodies from declining in a state of inertia.

So, in many ways, disappointment is an essential part of life. Without it, we would become complacent and slothful, success and love wouldn’t fill our hearts with as much joy, and there would be no push towards improving ourselves.

However, when circumstances take twists and turns we can't predict, we often feel discouraged. And we feel an urge to complain. Some people feel it’s a right. The so-called logic is “If the world is treating me unkindly, why shouldn’t I make some noise about it?”

Well, the “noise” may release some tension initially, but complaining doesn’t solve anything. Besides, it produces a negative mindset. It forces us to unwittingly dwell on what's wrong in our lives instead of focusing on what we can change or do to make things right. When complaining becomes a part of you, you’re inviting a lot of negative energy into your life.

When something goes differently than we had planned or when something that's difficult pops up unexpectedly, we should allow ourselves to feel the confusion, anger, or whatever other emotion comes along as a result.

But once you have vented, prevent yourself from dwelling on the thing that caused the negative emotion. Quit complaining. When you complain, you tell several people over and over about what went wrong. Your mind is focused on the horrible thing. You bring others down by your complaining. You bring yourself down. You become stuck in your own whiny, nagging slime.

So, after venting, allow yourself to pick up the pieces and see where you can go from where you are. What can you do to make things better? How can you respond so that meeting your main priority is still your focus? Think about things that have gone right in your life. Appreciate what you have been able to achieve so far.

By asking yourself questions and remembering past positive moments, your mind accepts what has just happened and moves on to what will happen next. It uses the lessons you just learned as corrective feedback to help you stay on track with your goal or to help you determine a new one.

So go ahead and vent, but quit complaining. You will be in a much better position to handle things when they don't go your way.

To me, I used to complain but the more I complain...more negative things attracted to me, even the people that I am with. It is not that to leave our "negative" friends. Sometimes, we can expect others to change, we can only control our mind, ourselves, so we have to change first..to inspire others to change. When they see a change in us and they will be influenced by us, they might change one day, who know..Like one of the book that I read " secrets of millionaire mind, our outer world reflect our inner world..So we have to get rid of this bad habit of complaining.

Robert Kiyosaki - Part 7: Focus!

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Download:

FLVMP43GP